Monday, July 18, 2005

Between 1992 and July 2005 i had several attempts at creating start-ups with various levels of success. I call this period Release 1.0 - a time when i spent most of my time being educated about a better way of executing the potential of the web.

Here are some of the start-up projects I founded:

2004/2005 - TESARACTESARAC is to some extent an ongoing project. There is one major enterprise using this technology (as a free beta test) that brings weblog facilities into the Enterprise. I did learn a LOT from this project however in both technology and the business of technology. I now feel i understand the Internet in a new way and the next 6 months will be an attempt at making something of this understanding.

2000/2003 - VentureTogetherI took significant time away from work to create what I hoped to be a big step into the social networking and service arena. The software platform was developed to a stage where I would say it was more advanced than any platform available at that time. It was very difficult however to get investment in the UK for such technologies and hence i started to think differently about how I could create the "next big thing".

2000/2002 - SightKeysThis was one that got away. It is still fundamentally a good idea, but investors see too many ways for others to write the same technology that taking it to the next level is difficult just now. I can't go into detail just now in case it moves on at some point, but if you remember RealNames and know about Google AdWords, then we're somewhere along those lines, but adding siginicant value.

1999/2000 - VentureTogether.orgThis was an experiment more than anything that attempted to bring together experience business people with inexperienced entrepreneurs (like myself) and allow ideas to be challenged and feedback to be sent. It was my first step into communities and social networking.Towards where the point where investment would have been sought, the "boom" collapsed and ultimately there was little interest at that time.

1997/1999 - Enterprise Information PortalAt the tail end of my degree I created an Enterprise Information Portal based mainly on emerging Xml and Xsl technologies. I have the source code to this day, but ultimately my lack of business experience showed in me failing to clinch a deal for capital. We did have the opportunity of £100,000 of investment, but found that many of the people we were to be working with took huge advantage of us and personal conflict was inevitable.1992/1996 : Soliton ComputingCreating a virtual web presence for businesses online. This was great for working my way through university, but ultimately there became far too many companies in this space and it was of little interest to me.